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Foster said that for the first time in the history of Hatteras, the tax base was high enough that they didn't need any more development to bolster their finances.
"Our tax base is no longer predicated on growth. Imagine that," he says. "We said yes to everything for as long as anybody can remember, because we were poor. In some ways, that made our town better, our lives better, but now it has turned, and turned fast." Foster pauses. "I know that I've lived too close to this to be objective about it. One of our commissioners said to me, "There are always a handful of people that cause trouble about these things, then they get built anyway, and everybody adjusts.' But you can't adjust to this. These guys literally and figuratively bulldoze their way to whatever they want, and they don't care about the fallout. We are the fallout -- you can't even afford to live where you were born. If your children want to live here, they can't, because you'd have to be a millionaire to buy a house. There's no fishermen, no mechanics, nothing, because where would they live? Those condos, and those 16-bedroom rental houses have another cost that they don't want anybody to talk about, and that cost is the death of my community."
Already, land prices are so high that older houses in the village are for sale to buyers who will jack them up and move them away, allowing the land underneath them to go on the market to investors, who will build "rental machines," Foster said. "Last year, my wife and I traveled to Africa to see some of the wildlife. We passed through a part of Zimbabwe where there had been all the land confiscations and the fighting, and, it was weird to me, but I couldn't help but think of my hometown. I do not want to seem overly dramatic -- I don't want to compare fire and killings with what is happening here in Hatteras. But I can tell you that the result -- the extermination of a place, and of a way of life, is the same. The towns are wrecked, and something ugly is coming in to replace them. You know, my family always said that we were just too remote here to attract the wealthy. What we didn't foresee was that the wealthy would send their money here from far away and just cash in on us.
"I have been able to see some of the humor in this," he continued, "if only as a way to keep from going crazy. I can look over there at those palm trees at the "Lonesome Palms' and try to imagine what they must have been thinking when they planted them there. But the arrogance of this whole development, the idea of a Senator, with the power structure behind him, doing something like this. You know, after I wrote the column for the Island Breeze, a friend of mine at the restaurant overheard a local realtor, a guy that I've known all my life, say "Yeah, I read it. That Ernie Foster! Just when we get to the point where our land is finally worth something, he wants to wake up in the morning and hear the birds sing!' Well, I have to admit, I am guilty of that!" Foster raises both hands, as if surrendering. "Guilty!" he repeats, and shakes with laughter.
Until the ferocious hurricanes of September 1846 opened the Hatteras Inlet (and the Oregon Inlet at Nag's Head), Hatteras Village was just a collection of land grants on a narrow spot in the Banks, grazed by the livestock of the Ballance and Stowe and Rollinson families, who had already been there for a hundred years. The land was heavily timbered with pine and oak, home to flocks of cedar waxwings, a few whitetailed deer, and to creatures like the Ocracoke king snake, which is still found on the Outer Banks and nowhere else on earth. Like the human inhabitants, there were many animals and plants from far away that were tossed ashore by the ocean and took root and became natives. A century and a half later, in the last week of February 2003, odd tracks in the sand on the beach at Frisco, just north of Hatteras Village, revealed the presence of an errant seal, swept by winds and currents from the northern seas. Near where the seal came ashore, the surf tossed and broke over a wide strip of asphalt that had once been a parking lot for a beach access, less than a decade ago, when the land was wider. There are many people now, Ernie Foster among them, who believe that the Banks are dwindling, that they were built over eons by the pumping of sand and mud from the great rivers of North Carolina, rivers that are now dammed deep on the mainland and subjugated to the needs of mankind. Other theorists believe that the Banks are maintained by periodic overwash, storm surges that transport sand from one side to the other, creating a kind of slow-motion perpetual migration. Nobody really knows the answer.
